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sinner0423 writes "Due to recentcomplaints on severalforums, Steampowered announced they are working on a fix to this stuttering problem in Half Life 2. Usually, a game bug isn't news-worthy, but the sporadic nature of this bug makes me wonder - who else has problems with HL2 pausing/skipping? This site outlines the problem certain users are having in a very clear & concise manner, and also includes some stopgap solutions from Erik Johnson & other Valve employees."

...one might have thought given the year of so the game has thought to have remained in a workable state they might have come across a bug like this, especially if it's affecting large numbers of people...

'W-w-w-w-we ap-p-p-pologise for any t-t-t-t-trouble that has been caused-d-d-d by this b-b-b-b-fnargen-b-b-b-b-bug, we are l-l-l-labia-l-l-looking into this and will fix this problem as soon p-p-p-p-p-possible. CUNT!'

1920x1600? What kind of display do you have? I doubt there is any device available for less than, say, a thousand bucks that can make use of that kind of resolutions. Oh, many CRTs will display it all right, but their phosphor coating won't be designer for anything above 1600x1200 for a 21". If anything, higher resolutions would result in some sort of anti-aliasing (aka blurring). Or am I wrong? I'm not a display engineer after all... Or maybe you simply do have a very expensive display.:)

I'm sitting at a CRT which is perfectly fine at 2048x1536 (except that I can only get 16-bit color, due to lack of bandwidth). Sony Trinitron Multiscan E400; I got mine used from work, but I don't think it was over $500 or so new when they got it.

Of course, I run it at 1280x1024 normally, but that's just because I like my 75dpi bitmapped fonts, and they're a bit too small to read at higher resolution (even though, if I look really closely, they're perfectly reproduced). I doubt it could go much higher, tho

That's the third reply stating that CRTs will display very high resolutions - I'm aware of that. You can also print 4pt fonts on a 350 dpi printer. That doesn't mean it's a good idea. Your Sony E400 has a dot pitch of 0.24 mm, (a) that means there are monitor width / 0.24 mm ~= 1650 phosphor dots horizontally, (b) which sets an upper bound for the resolution the monitor can display.

Now, as I mentioned before, I'm by no means an expert (unless having basic knowledge on how a CRT works makes me one), so both (a) and (b) could be wrong. So feel free to address those, but please don't just tell me how you're happily running your 15" CRT at 1800x(400*Pi).;) No offense intended.

On a sidenote, I've also never heard of being limited to a certain color-depth when running a CRT - not as long as you're talking about more than 1 bit, ie black and white. The CRT just gets analogue color values (voltages, in fact) anyway, so color depth as a bit value is really a feature of the graphics card and operating system. Unless you were talking about signal/noise ratio of the analogue monitor connection limiting the color precision or something.

As I said, monitors will display it, just like my really old 15" CRT would display 1600x1200 (at an atrocious refresh rate, though). But you're projecting 1920 (horizontal) pixels at just about 1500 phosphor dots - I estimated 40 cm width and a 0.26 dot pitch; the numbers will be a bit off but the point stands.

And no, neither monitor is available for less than $1,000. But I didn't say I spent less than $1,000. These are $3,500+ monitors.

Nope, you didn't say that, and I did not intend to imply so. I was genuinely wondering, and also used the chance to try and find out whether there was any point to running a higher resolution than a monitor was designed for.

In the past, I guess this issue never even came up, because the electronic circuitry in the displays (and even in the video cards) weren't able to synch up with (or generate resolutions greater) than what the phosphors on the tube could display accurately.

But in the age of even "consumer grade" video boards outputing resolutions of upwards of 1600 pixels v

I unlocked the game at 8am 16/11/2004 (GMT), and was playing 15 minutes later. Not had a single crash.

I had a similar experience. Installed via Steam and it worked fine right away. However... there are known, verified problems with the standard installer for people who got the game the old fashioned way, so neither your nor my experience here makes a bit of difference if this guy ran into those installer bugs.

Wow! you must be racing through the game very quickly and missing lots of the gameplay if you find it loading content every five minutes.

I've been going through the game at a leisurely pace and there are quite a few stretches of game where the loading comes even quicker than every five minutes. It is somewhat inconsistent though.. Sometimes you'll go 10-20 minutes without a reload, then sometimes you seem to be reloading every 3-6 minutes. It does seem a bit excessive, IMO.. but not a deal breaker.

Not seen that at all on the Ravenholm level. I'm quite surprised you say that, as the map boundaries always seem to be far away from the next/last monster. I've not played the entire game yet, but I certainly didn't see it on the map you talk of.

I know exactly what he is talking about. On the part of Ravenholm where you need to position the platform so you can jump across to the roofs.. and there is a little courtyard with one of those spinning metal things you can control with the gravity gun. There is a door portal in that area that triggers a level load and if you happen to not go exactly the right way the first time, you'll walk around in a circle that causes the level to load again, and then if you back up a bit? Loads again... Annoying little spot. FWIW, that's the only one like that I've seen in the game so far (I'm currently pretty deep into the antlions part).

In any case, Half-Life 2 is absolutely an amazing game and I suggest it as a must buy for any PC gamer, but the original poster's problems are all pretty valid. I disagree that they are bad enough to merit waiting 5 years to play the game.. but then I got lucky and wasn't hit by the annoying installer bugs either...

Amen to that. I can't believe something as obvious as the installer bug got through. It caused me no end of delay until I finally got on line and found out the problem was known and what the work around was.

that you can ditch the water skimmer and then get stuck after playing for 20min and finding a point where you need it but cant go back to get it

God damn! You, too? That pissed me off so bad. I actually got all the way to the ramp attached to the elevator with pulley cables and washing machine puzzle before I got stuck and it said, "A.I Disabled" after screwing around for a while trying to figure something out. It appeared no matter what game I loaded from there on, even if I started a new game. Backing up the savegames and reinstalling did the trick, though. After starting a new game from that chapter, I had a pretty big smack on the forehead after I saw the swamp boat RIGHT THERE! Did I actually miss that?

I was having too much fun in the beginning of the game to think about the tedium of walking the super long distances to get there. I assumed I just broke the game, because that appears to be something I do a lot. I've broken Painkiller, Star Trek: Elite Force 2, Ultima 7 (not hard to do, but I didn't do anything wrong) and Strife to a point where I can't continue in the game. Plus, I sooner assumed the helicopter and radiation sewage crap was just an obnoxious point in the game rather than needing a special tool to get past it (think really unfair games, like Contra Adventure where there's three hard bosses in a row). I had already spent a half-hour trying to play lumberjack with the blue plastic drums getting past the first radiation pool.

If you ever need a playtester, I'm your guy, as I seem to be really good at breaking software:)

As for the stuttering, I'm pissed that I had to switch back from my kX Project Drivers [kxproject.com] on my SBLive! Value back to the mediocre (but reliable) official drivers. I hope any fixes that come out will remedy it.

This bug has been degrading an excellent game for many people--good to see Valve finally acknowledge it.

Now if only they would fix the "Loading" delays that show up every 3 minutes... it's 2004 already, there has *got* to be some way to stream/cache/prefetch around having to break up the game experience so much.

GTA San Andreas has done something wonderful to that effect btw - no loading screens at all, ever! Pretty amazing IMHO, considering the level is about 10 times the size of the previous games even with their respective loading screens taken into account!

Yeah, no loading screens at all, ever!Oh wait, except that one before you can play, oh.. and the ones that come while loading games, and while not a loading screen as such, when entering buildings or starting missions, at times it can take up to around a minute with nothing but a black screen and the name of the place/mission in the bottom corner. And while walking around the map, or more specifically, while driving or flying about the map, sometimes the floor, walls or buildings don't actually load until after you have crashed into them, although that is somewhat more rarer than the above.

The problem is that, in the end, nobody really cares. Loading seamlessly is hard and raises system requirements quite a bit (since not only do you need to hold two levels in memory at times, but you also need to be loading an entire new level while the player is playing.)

And in the end nobody's going to say "Well, I *would* buy Half-Life 2. But every ten or fifteen minutes I have to spend ten seconds waiting for a new level to load. So I won't."

But every ten or fifteen minutes I have to spend ten seconds waiting for a new level to load.

If that was the actual ratio of play time to load time, I doubt anyone would complain at all - I sure wouldn't. But the problem is that it takes quite a bit longer than that, which becomes especially noticeable during parts of the Route Kanal chapter - you cover so much ground so fast on the hoverbike, that there are places where you're loading a new segment every two or three minutes, and then the ratio becomes a rather aggravating three-minutes-of-play-time to one-minute-of-load-time. It's hardly a dealbreaker, and I still love the game, but it's a bit annoying.

Dungeon Siege does a very good job at loading small bits in the background such that you never see a single delay from the game start to end if you were to just walk around through the entire game world. Its definately possible for some games, but maybe not that practical for a FPS game?

I never said it wasn't possible. It is, of course, possible. It's just difficult.

Personally I found Dungeon Siege to be a brutally boring game after the first few hours. I'd rather they spent that time working on gameplay than seamless loading. They might have created a game that was fun.:P

The problem is that, in the end, nobody really cares. Loading seamlessly is hard and raises system requirements quite a bit (since not only do you need to hold two levels in memory at times, but you also need to be loading an entire new level while the player is playing.)

I'm not sure nobody cares (it's not as if there's much competition in the massively-anticipated games of 2004 stakes), but getting rid of pauses doesn't necessarily mean huge technical hurdles. e.g. Metroid Prime makes you shoot unif

The loading times are awful, and loading occurs way too often. It really wrecked my suspension of disbelief. Example: At the beginning, when you're running to the roof, the game stops to load for 30 seconds or so in the middle of fierce action! How am I supposed to keep my adrenaline up during that time, by slapping myself in the face or what? This is not good game design.

What I cannot understand is the people praising this game as a whole to high heavens. Sure, the Source engine kicks ass and everything, but what I really expected from a sequel to Half-Life was a coherent story and script. After completing the game, all I had was an aftertaste of a huge railroaded marathon and a handful of loose ends in the script.

I was left confused and unsatisfied. Props to Valve for making the game, but even the most decorated shell is empty without a good plot.

Maybe Half-Life 2 is really an introduction to third part of the story, where all the pieces come together. But it makes me a bit unease thinking that all these years I was only waiting for a prologue to the real thing.

I noticed the stuttering, but for me it's just a second or two, nothing serious. The "loading" screens are far worse, and I doubt those are going away.

The big problem for me was texture corruption. I'd have random colored triangles on apparently random textures. Finally tracked down a fix - turn off "Catalyst AI" in the Catalyst Control Panel (apparently it's an ATI-only problem), which required that I *get* the Catalyst Control Panel.

First, Valve knocked it out of the park on this game. It's absolutely the most incredible game I've played in years.. I'd even venture to say I'm as hooked on this one as I was on Doom way back when.

Although I didn't experience the stuttering bug others are, I have noticed how great Valve has been supporting this game. They communicate regularly (sometimes individually) and are really standing behind their product. Too bad other companies don't follow their lead.

I think the most interesting thing to note about HL2 is the fact that it does an excellent job of giving the *illusion* of emergent gameplay. For the uninitiated, emergent gameplay is a hot topic in gaming right now, and is basically a fancy term for the idea that the solutions to a given problem in a game should only really be limited by the creativity of the person playing it.

What makes HL2's design so interesting is the fact that while many of the puzzles and levels appear to allow the player a lot of c

It's not a problem that happens all the time, only when entering a new area. Given that the main game is single player, I don't think it really detracts from the game any more than the loading times. It's really a minor flaw that most companies would never even come back to fix. I guess it keeps things from being 'flawless', but there is so much going for this game that something small like this is not something to get excited over.

It can detract from the gameplay. Expecially if the game decides to crash right after you enter that area. This happened to me a couple times, at the same exact spot. It was quite aggrivating. Then there was the time the game forgot to load part of the level, and the menus were messed up so I couldn't save and reload.

I've seen this a couple times, mostly right after It loads a part of the game, but it isnt that annoying. The biggest problem I have with halflife 2 is that it takes close to 13 minuites to actually load the game...

This is because the game loads an actual map to show behind the main menu. I got the following fix from the PA forums:

Go into your Steamapps folder, open the folder that is your user name, then hl2, then gcf, then open the valve.rc file with notepad and add "//" to the beginning of the last line that says "startmenu" or something.

Yawn. Every Linux distro gets released bug-free, right?...Usually, a game bug isn't news-worthy, but the sporadic nature of this bug makes me wonder - who else has problems with HL2 pausing/skipping?

Well, you sure linked [rage3d.com] a ton [penny-arcade.com] of forums [hlfallout.net], how about you just read those threads? Or perhaps other gamer boards?

Listen, I know HL2 is the biggest thing to happen to the gaming community in quite some time. I know the controversy surrounding it, Gabe Newell, Vivendi, Valve and a piece of caerphilly [welshwales.co.uk] cheese [newenglandcheese.com]. I just don't see why a bug that is sporadic and what seems like a very minute number of people are having makes the frontpage.

Yes, I expected to get modded down.No, I don't care.Yes, I have "been around here for a while, and I know how the place works!"No, these aren't the droids you're looking for.

First off I'm sorry but what the hell does Linux have to do with this? Yea Linux has bugs, so what? Most of the distros out there don't cost $49. Even if they did what does that have to do with the price of tea in China? Linux isn't a game and nobody here said "too bad HL2 isn't as bug free as Linux".

Second and related to my first point this is a major problem that the game obviously should not have shipped with. Accepting your point that all software has bugs that doesn't mean something that was delayed for years and years should be able to ship with such a noticeable flaw. If they had done a public demo this would have been very apparent and could have been fixed. It is completely right to hold Valve's feet to the fire on this. On the topic of whether this is "front page material" I happen to think that it is. Slashdot is news for nerds and most nerds are playing HL2 right now being that its one of the biggest releases of any piece of software this year. I'm sure many of the readers here are glad to hear this info. Yea it could have easily gone in the gaming section but so what? What , you wanted to read yet another article on the Ipod?

Well, I actually do have that problem, but it's not as bad as it is for some (taking from 5 to 10 seconds to fix itself). For me, it takes 1 or 2 seconds max, and it doesn't happen all the time. But when it does, it's a pain in the ass.

I used to have that with Doom 3, but lowering quality/resolution would fix it, which doesn't cut it on HL2. I used to have that with Counter Strike Source too, and wondered what was wrong.

No software commercial or otherwise would ever get released if the developer was to wait for a zero bug count. Even if they did release something someone would manage to break it. Thats the way of the world.

i wonder what the turnaround time will be. probably a few days. too bad its not open-source. we'd have a patch in a few hours.

Well, if was open source, I would hope that the programmers ignored typical variable and function naming conventions and used all lowercase letters. How many patches (spaced a few hours apart) do you think it would take before the original problem, and all resulting problems from untested patches were repaired?

Valve has already had a number of years to make this game, and damn nea

# It occurs on both Intel and AMD CPUs of all speeds.# It occurs on systems with 2+ GB of RAM although it appears to be worse for users with 512MB of RAM or less.# It occurs on both ATI and NVIDIA video cards, including video cards with 256MB RAM.# It occurs with multiple sound cards and chipsets, including the Sound Blaster Live!, Audigy, Audigy 2, NVIDIA SoundStorm, Turtle Beach Santa Cruz, Realtek, etc.# It occurs after disabling sound in-game, disabling the sound

A bug in Half Life 2 is perhaps the biggest problem being suffered by the human race in our time. Perhaps every government worldwide, every corporation, every organization, and every individual should stop everything they are doing at this moment, so that all the resources available to mankind can be allocated to correcting the bug in Half Life 2. Otherwise, we are doomed to destruction.

In other words, this is not a bottom of the line system, and runs Doom 3 perfectly...

Now, when I first installed the game, I installed it to my D: drive, which happened to be an older 30GB drive that came from my previous computer. I just stuck it in there as a slave drive for extra storage space, having filled up the 120GB primary IDE hard drive a while ago...

Anyway, I noticed the stuttering always seemed to happen when the system was accessing data from the hard drive.

I finally went into the Device Mangler (haha... that's what I call it anyways, you might know it as the Device Manager), and checked the DMA settings on my secondary hard drive... Sure enough, it was only using PIO Mode!!! I always wondered why that second hard drive was slow. I tried to enable DMA mode, but was out of DMA channels, so I couldn't.

Anyway, I freed up some space on my hard drive and moved it to the primary hard drive... voila, problem solved! Now the game plays smoothly and the immersion experience is what it should be...

This problem seems to be linked to either inadequate DMA support for your hard drive (which can spike the CPU during disk access and loading times), or a hard drive that just isn't fast enough to keep up. Also, because all of the sound in the game is MP3 files that are streamed off of the hard drive, hard drive bandwidth seems to be very important for this game, in addition, I'm sure all of the MP3 decompression makes you take a big CPU hit, especially when they're mixing multiple channels of MP3 audio together at once and outputting it to 5.1 surround.

This is just a theory of mine, but it worked for me... Put the game on your fastest hard drive, and defragment it... Make sure DMA is enabled for that hard drive, and you should (hopefully) be set.

I have the game running off a 15k rpm 18gig SCSI (Seagate cheetah) - with a adaptec scsi card and still have the stuttering problem. I have a similar system (p4 3.0, 1 gig dual channel, ATI Radeon 9600Pro 256mb, Winxp).

Although I admit it did get better after I disabled norton antivirus - but now I'm waiting half a second when it loads new textures rather than 1-2 seconds (and sometimes up to 5 seconds)

The stuttering only really becomes apparant when I get back to City 17 for the second time. From there until the end of the game, it gets steadily worse. Has anyone else noticed that it almost always coincides with new audio happening?

Good game, bad delivery.
Unlocking the game took me 20 minutes, and that was STILL too long to wait after installing several CDs worth of mass. For some, it took a lot longer. The backup thing is great. Points there.
The system requirements are a little high, and the ATI/Nvidia thing is kind of shady. However, the loading times and the stuttering kill the game. Its like walking into an art museum with strobe lights and a lot of heavy smokers around.
The game could be so much cooler.

When open source applications have bugs in them, people report them to bugzilla or equivalent and wait. If anyone complains people say "they'll work on it, if you want it done faster, do it yourself".

As soon as the software isn't free all of a sudden its "those bastards releasing software with more than 0 bugs in it!"

Guess what. The introduction of money doesn't all of a sudden make developers more perfect. They have deadlines, priorities and are imperfect, like other people. Just because software is less than free doesn't mean you can expect it to be perfectly bug free.

It's also funny all the complaints about half-life 2 have to do with the steam system. Nobody seems to be making comments about the actual game itself. Oh, could that be because the game itself is an indisputably amazing work of art? Sorry warez dudes, you can't get a free ride on this one. For me, I don't mind as its probably the only PC game I will buy for the next 5 years. Half-Life 2 and its mods will probably be the only pc game worth playing for a long time to come. Half-Life 1 lived up to that, and I expect no less from 2. It's worth more than the lousy 50 bucks they charge for it. So quit your bitching. If you don't like the DRM, then crack it, just like you do with all the RIAA and MPAA DRM.

It seems quite simple what's causing the stuttering, at least on my PC.

Remember the deja-vu scene in The Matrix? That's what it is.

No, I'm not joking. Whenever I hit an invisible trigger that causes the world to change (ie spawn bad guys, spawn helicopter), that's when it stutters for me. The majority of the stutters I get are immediately followed by some action happening.

It actually makes it easy for me to tell when I'm about to be ambushed. Unfortunately, this takes away the thrill of the surprise

It's not "motion sickness" it's a Simulator sickness that airforce pilots also experiance. There was a long thread discussing it on the GameFAQs Half Life 2 forum, but it's probably been spammed to the 50th page by now.

Running two monitors gives me a different perspective on this bug. When the stuttering occurs, HL2 loses its grip on my mouse, and the mouse is free to move into my second monitor. The game pauses until I move the mouse back over the game screen.

Earlier this year I read in several PC gaming mags about how 2004 was Year of the PC Game; about how Half Life 2 and Doom 3 would set the record straight and reclaim the crown of video gaming from the consoles. Doom 3 was fun, but didn't change the world, and Half Life 2 fully proves why the PC will remain a niche market. One person's comment here on this story tells people to quit whining about the problem because all they have to change their hardware around. That kind of comment - that it's a matter-of-fact that you have to spend hours monkeyassing with your PC to get a game to work - should deeply worry stalwarts of the PC industry.

Even with fairly rampant Xbox piracy, Microsoft's anti-piracy strategy with Halo 2 was transparent to nearly all xbox owners who legitimately bought the game. Yet, not only are all of HL2's users penalized for the piracy, but obviously the game was rushed through testing. Now, to be fair, testing a PC game is far more work than testing a console. But when that so-called mainstream gamer goes to pick up Half Life 2, they don't give a rip if someone else is pirating or if Valve didn't have the time or resources to check if their game worked. To them, the only thing that matters is that their game takes hours to work, and when it does it does so half-assed.

Console makers (Nintendo, MS, Sony) keep the publishers in check with quality issues like these. For the PC, there's no one entity at stake if PC games take 5 hours of work to run properly. But Valve is hurting not only themselves but the entire PC gaming industry by releasing games that require anti-piracy measures like Steam and then ultimately don't work.

You haven't been playing the right console games. With regards to the PC, where is the experimentation we see in console games like Katamari Damacy, REZ, Ico, Panzer Dragoon Orta - I could go on. Bejewled? Age of Empires? Doom 3? I'll give you the Sims, but that's all I can think of. "Graphics, speed, etc" do not a good game make.

I experienced this as well, maybe 4 or 5 times throughout the entire game. I thought it was just my fragged harddrive, since my specs are decent (xp3200+, radeon 9600 pro, 1 gig pc3200 ram). But now that I find out it's affecting most people... I STILL dont care, because honestly, it's not that big of a deal. Of course I would prefer it not to be there but I never once thought to myself, "Gee this sure ruins the experience, what the hell was Valve thinking, now I'm pissed off and will rate half life 2 poorl

Isn't this stuttering just the game loading textures into the video card's RAM?

I have an ATI 9700, and when HL2 did its little autoconfiguration of video options, It set me up to have medium texture detail (smaller, less detailed textures resulting in blurry, pixellated walls but consuming less video RAM). I had no problems with stuttering, but I hated the low-detail textures, as they took away from what was supposedly one of the best looking games in history.

Doom3 plays just fine on my 2.0Ghz machine with 512Meg of RAM and an ATI Radeon 9600 Pro card.

Half-Life 2 stutters all the time, sometimes badly. I thought it was just because my machine is under-powered for the game, but I definitely exceed the specs, and turning down some of the detail and unloading some services and other applications to free up more memory didn't help the problem.

Glad to see it's not just me, and is likely a problem wtih the game itself.

I bought my GameCube in the fall of 2002, and the first game I owned for it was Metroid Prime. I got about 7 hours into it, the game froze, and a buzzing sound filled the speakers.

I thought, "Holy shit! My GameCube is broken!"

Why? Because I thought that was more possible than a Nintendo game having a bug of that magnitude.

My GameCube wasn't broken. Metroid Prime did have a bug, a rather rare one, that overflowed a buffer (I believe) when changing areas. the overflow was rare enough that most gamers never experienced it. I was one of the lucky ones that had it happen twice.

My point is not that consoles can have bugs too. My point is that with the good console game companies this sort of thing is so rare, you can think your hardware died when it happens.

I assume that PC games will have fatal bugs when they are released, and I also assume that if the game is not popular, these bugs may never be fixed. That is why I don't buy PC games until they have been out a year. How can you get excited about a launch when there is a decent chance you will not be able to play the game?

By the way, Nintendo fixed that bug and offered a replacement to anyone who wanted it. The Metroid Prime discs today do not have the problem.

Not only that, but it will give them a false sense of security, "well, at least if I get killed I only have to sit out for a few minutes until the next round starts," or "Oh well, I took 3 shots, but they were all to the leg so I'll still be able to run around quickly and jump over boxes."

In 5 years, once the activation server is down, or in 10 or whatever, what you got is a pretty coaster because you can't activate your legally purchased game without a crack.

OTOH about your points :
* you can automatically patches if you program for it. That msot game except MMOG don't do it isn't because of a technical ground, but rather a money/marketing ground. So no advantage here.
* I can install normal CD on many computer as I want, and only play on the one I have the physical CD. No change either here.
* Delivery isn't as convenient as you say, if you do not have a broad band, or a nice DSL. Heck with a 26 modem I can order something on an online store and it is delivered at home. But Steam would be unusable on such a connection.

I am sorry, but you are overplaying the advantage a lot. True this is a new mode of delivery for those which want the game on the day retail begin to sell it, but do not make up things out of thin air. This is pretty much the only advantage, the rest is only nice for the company selling the game.

Steam allows automatic patching, so once a bug is found and fixed, it can be applied immediately; no more having to search for patches.

It seems you have no choice as to whether you want a patch or not. It's all automatic. Now, there are advantages to this, but it also means that if your game was previously working and then they somehow introduce a bug into the game, you can't avoid it.

You can install the games on as many computers as you want; you just can't play them on more than one computer at a ti

Do you turn around and blame Ford when you get ticketed for speeding 30mph over the limit? Do you turn around and blame Wal-Mart when you burn your the chicken you were making for dinner? Do you blame the local hardware store when you hammer a nail through a water pipe?

Going off my current experience (reinstalling from a retail DVD right now after a windows reinstall), downloading it will take about as long as installing, decrypting and activating the damned thing. The only difference is that with retail you at least have something physical to show for it. Still takes sodding ages to install either way...

I get the stuttering as well. Not the greatest system in the world here (dual AthlonMP 1800+, 512MB RAM, Radeon 9800XT, SB Live) but the CPUs are at about 50%(+/-25%) utilisation each while playing the game, and the graphics card seems to be able to handle it pretty well. Yet, I get the stuttering, but not all the time.